Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

January in Review

The site rolls along for another month. Every once in a while I look at the other templates that WordPress.com offers for bloggers, but none of them suits me quite as well as this one. Yes, I could do whatever I wanted if I hosted the site myself, but I know I would end up spending more time tinkering and less time writing.

On the downside of things, I did get evicted from the EVE Blog Pack in order to free up one of the 30 slots to which the pack is limited so that a more active EVE blogger might be added, an event heralded by a line in the pack log reading “And removed some inactive blogs.”

It seems that CrazyKinux has decided that the pack should be for blogs that focus exclusively on EVE. Hybrids take it in the nuts again. I guess I won’t have to carry on agitating for my Pack Profiles idea.

One Year Ago

Last January I seemed to be writing all sorts of stuff that has come back to haunt me.

And, finally, in Lord of the Rings Online I was able to pick up my Bree Pony, the 2007 holiday gift to founders.

New Linking Sites

Every month I worry that I am not going to have a site to link in this section. This month, however, I have way too many. I like to keep the list small enough that people are likely to click on the whole list. So, since I have so many this time around, I am going to hold a few back for next month.

I really enjoyed reading this article. Warcraft has so many different things to do! I’m amazed daily at how many new things people are constantly creating and showing to the public. Your article is very well written. Thanks for the great read
[I had to assume this was spam because it was in response to this post. If I this comment was yours and you feel I was incorrect… boy you have low standards.]

EVE Online

With the passing of the holidays and the return of health and sanity, I was able to spend some more time in space. I have been out mining that now-so-lucrative veldspar as tritanium prices have been holding above 4 ISK. I have also done some level 4 missions, mostly to gain faction for my mining alt and to generate cash and salvage.

I have lots of money in my wallet and my standing is over 8 with four factions now, but I do not really have a short and long term goal in EVE, and that is one of the keys to keeping EVE interesting. The Monty Burns “Make more money!” doesn’t cut it alone at some point after a billion ISK.

So I have been training up combat skills while I figure out my next path in EVE.

EverQuest II

As much fun as Reynaldo Fabulous was to play, my time spent in Norrath has fallen off dramatically over the last month. Even the opulent Revelry and Honor guild hall can’t draw me in. But as I said on SUWT #41, the core group of people with whom I game aren’t in Norrath either.

And so I let my subscription lapse. There is no point in paying if I am not playing.
Lord of the Rings Online

I have been running through Middle-earth on a regular basis on the theory that having a group of people around in the Podcasters of Bree kinship will allow me some grouping opportunities. I am catching up with them, but I am not sure what will happen when I get there. I am the only person on the left coast in the kinship it seems, so when I’m logging on to start playing, they’re all logging off to go to bed. Or so they say. Even Gaff, the three-box leveling dynamo has been nowhere to be seen for the last couple of weeks.

Still, I am enjoying the game, having found many of the rough spots smoothed over somewhat. It is far from perfect. At some point I’ll get annoyed enough to do a “five things that annoy me” post about the game again. But it is nice. I keep saying that. And it is Middle-earth. And I have a lifetime subscription. And there is Moria somewhere out there.

World of Warcraft

It has been hard not to play WoW over the last month.

The instance group has been on a bit of a hiatus due to outside commitments in January. (And not, I hope, because I made us look less than able in a post.) So I have tried to leave Vikund idle. But, while I have many alts, he is my main for a lot of things.

So I find myself logging in just to run the Kalu’ak daily quests because I want that fishing pole they offer when you hit exalted. I never thought I would do a faction grind. I have zero factions at exalted on any of my characters in WoW. Then I saw that fishing pole. We all have a price.

So my goal now is to not get too far ahead of the rest of the group.

Wii

I meant to write about some of the Wii games that showed up for Christmas. Instead I wrote about how our Wii seems to be making a lot more noise now. Well, more topics for later.

Coming Up

I fully expect the return of the instance group to happen in February, at which point Ingvar the Plunderer will get his comeuppance at last.

I see no end in sight for LOTRO currently. I will have to find out what happened to Gaff. I need his help for a few fellowship quests, plus I understand that I will get a new class quest at level 30, which is not all that far off.

I will have to come up with a plan for EVE Online. It isn’t going to be 0.0, so don’t even go there. That requires way too much time commitment. I need something bigger than skilling my alt up to a Vulture and honing Wilhelm’s combat skills further, but smaller than a complete change in play style. We shall see.

And, finally, I want to see if I can get this sort of thing going on FARK.

A man can dream.

[Editors note: This blog does not in any way endorse actually punching Amy Tan or any other author hung up on monther/daughter relationships.]

Man, oh man I feel a tinge of guiltiness after reading your post and the comments above.

Wilhelm you’ve got amazing EVE content and I’ll still link to them as often as I can. The request to be only EVE-specific came from other Pack members as well as readers, and after considering all options I felt it was important that the EVE Blog Pack had that focus.

I haven’t listed the members that were “evicted” from the Pack, but I plan on doing a feature on past members. And you sir will certainly have your feature and profile!

I hope you’ll still drop by once in a while and that my comments won’t all of a sudden disappear from TAGN!

@CK – I understand your reasoning, and I tried to be somewhat neutral in my message, but I am a bit miffed that what you wrote here had considerably more information than the email I got from you telling me I was out. Big deal, I know, poor little me. But it might be something to consider when dealing with members of the pack in the future.

And, not to pick nits, but you have at times noted in the pack log the departure of some people but not others. Again, I can only recommend consistency and communication.

@Ysharros – Somewhere I have a post half-done about the philosophy of my blogroll. I will give you a preview though. One of the rules is “More is not better.” As with CK’s blog pack, just letting anybody in does not do people on the roll much good, it just reduces the chances of any given individual getting clicked.

The other tidbit I will share in advance is that, from my observations, the top two or three listings on a blog roll get the lions share of the clicks. So Rick at /Random gets most of the blogroll action from my site thanks to his choice of names and that I didn’t translate it to “Slash Random.” So if you want traffic from a blog roll that is sorted alphabetically, be at the top.

Oooh, I never stumbled upon that guildname generator.
Strikes me as odd that it your #1 viewed post, because when I created mine (at http://laststand.eu.org/guildname/), although I didn’t actually look at the real guild names out there and just used the most ridiculous ones I saw on my server – it sparked some laughs, but no real feedback evolved :P
I also converted it to a WoW addon, but it desperately needs some updates (http://www.wowace.com/projects/project-14153/)